Introduction to landscape initiative maturity
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Landscape initiatives bring together multiple stakeholders—such as local communities, businesses, governments, and other key actors—within a defined geographic area to address sustainability challenges like deforestation, biodiversity loss, and livelihoods. Their strength lies in aligning diverse interests around shared goals, actions, and investments to drive long-term sustainability at scale.
As landscape and jurisdictional approaches gain recognition as essential tools for building resilient supply chains and mitigating risks, there is a growing need for a common framework to evaluate and strengthen the maturity of these initiatives. A shared understanding of what makes an initiative credible and effective ensures that resources are directed toward initiatives with the highest potential for impact, focusing on the elements that matter most.
The landscape initiative maturity framework provides a standardized and credible way to assess a landscape initiative’s progress, identify strengths and gaps, and guide development toward widely accepted best practices for Integrated Landscape Management, enhancing credibility, effectiveness, and impact. Originally based on CDP's , the framework was expanded with specific sub-criteria to enhance clarity and ease of implementation.
By assessing their maturity, landscape initiatives can:
Highlight strengths and achievements to key stakeholders, including supply chain companies, donors, and investors.
Identify priority areas for further development and resource allocation.
Strengthen governance and strategic planning to improve long-term resilience.
Once published, an initiative’s profile can be easily shared with supporting organizations. For example, companies disclosing to CDP can reference the profile to demonstrate the maturity of initiatives they support. Similarly, companies setting Science-Based Targets for Nature must provide details on the maturity of any initiative they engage with as part of their Landscape Engagement target.
By completing a LandScale profile, initiatives not only gain visibility and credibility but also receive structured feedback from the LandScale team on which sub-criteria they have achieved and where further development is needed.